from the shocking,-i-know dept

Back in 2010, we suggested that the mad dash by various publications to build fee-based iPad apps was completely misguided, reminiscent of the belief in the 90s that publications could sell CD-ROM versions of their magazines. As we noted, there's nothing that special about the iPad format that takes away the natural abundance of the internet, and pretending that it was really any different than a portal to the wider internet with all its options was a fool's errand. In particular, we called out Rupert Murdoch's obsession with creating an iPad-only publication. In fact, we were confused why all the publishers investing so much in apps didn't put that same sort of effort into improving the features on their websites. A few months ago, the editor-in-chief and publisher of MIT's Tech Review more or less made the same point, saying that the future was on the web, betting on HTML 5 to make the site "look great on a laptop or desktop, tablet or smartphone" and then killing off the apps it had developed.

While others aren't going that far, there's more and more evidence that betting on apps was, in fact, the exact mistake that we predicted. Mathew Ingram summarizes how both The Huffington Post and Murdoch's The Daily have failed with their fee-based iPad app strategy. He makes the same basic point that a winner of our "most insightful comment" (by Robert Weller) made recently: that people get their news from lots of sources, so paying for a bunch of apps just doesn't make sense. In fact, it takes away from the value. As Ingram notes:

What he's basically saying is that the publishers focusing on apps are trying to create artificial scarcity by building digital silos. But that actually takes value away from those publications. People interact with the news in all sorts of ways that go way beyond "reading." But individual apps often make that more difficult. It involves extra effort (and cost) while providing less benefit. All because publishers are looking for something (anything!) that resembles some fencing so they can build a gate and go back to pretending they're in the gatekeeper business.

Hopefully publishers will finally stop looking to recreate the past by building artificial walls, and start looking at ways to make money that embrace the internet and what it enables.